The other day, someone said, “AI security is fundamentally data security”. And this got me thinking. Is it? Can AI security simply be solved with a typical data security strategy? It’s one of those statements that sounds correct when you first hear it, and it gets a few nods in the room, but then it quietly does a lot of damage to how people think about the problem. So, let’s dive into it, because the statement is really quite misleading.

Cybersecurity teams today are not short on tools or alerts. In many organizations, continuous signals are being generated across endpoints, networks, cloud platforms, and identity systems. The challenge is not visibility, but the execution. The gap seen in cybersecurity skills is not just a hiring problem. It directly affects an organization's ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. Security teams may miss reviewing some alerts or struggle to understand certain incidents.

For most of the Internet’s history, public and private infrastructure operated as separate worlds. Public applications lived behind content delivery networks (CDNs) and web application firewalls (WAFs). Private applications lived behind virtual private networks (VPNs), firewalls, and separate operational stacks. We think that distinction is becoming obsolete.

CrowdStrike has joined the OpenID Foundation as a Sustaining Corporate Member, its highest level of membership, and is also now a member of IDPro. Together, these commitments reflect a focused effort to help shape the future of identity-first security through both standards leadership and real-world deployment and a shift beyond static authentication toward more dynamic, interoperable, and effective identity security.